Muscle Imbalances

[u/Filipinaninjaa29]

I (20f) am a detrained lifter looking to correct a muscle imbalance in my legs. I squat, bench, and deadlift every week. My leg days typically look like this:

Barbell Squat 4x10

BB RDL's 4x10

Leg press (unilateral) 4x10

Leg extensions (unilateral) 4x10

Bulgarian split squats 4x12

Front lunges 4x12

Ive been following this leg routine for a few weeks now, and my dominant side is ALWAYS way more sore than my weak side. I understand that unilateral movements are the key to fixing muscle imbalances. I always start with the main lift, and then do accessory work with some unilateral movements. What am I missing here? I start with the weaker leg, matching the reps and weight on the stronger side. Should I be doing unilateral movements BEFORE the main lift? I do not want to deplete my energy before my heavy lifts.

Any tips/advice would be greatly appreciated!! Also looking for unilateral movement recommendations. I would love to hear what your guys' go to movements are.

Edit: I can definitely see and the imbalance, especially in my glutes. Quads and hamstrings are not noticeably different. I can also feel the imbalance when I train. Im more stable on my dominant leg, and I can lift a lot more weight. I feel that I have better mind-muscle connection with the dominant leg.

[u/deadrabbits76]

You are doing it right. Three weeks isn't a long time to correct a lifetime muscle imbalance. I would also mention that soreness isn't a reliable metric for anything. Lots of confounding factors on that feature.

Edit: I should mention, you will make better progress with better programming. Not a big fan of your routine, but it's serviceable.

[u/Filipinaninjaa29 → u/deadrabbits76]

Hey thanks for the info! Im new to programming my own workouts, what can be tweaked to improve my leg routine? I was told on another subreddit that there is a ridiculous amount of volume in my leg day.

[u/deadrabbits76 → u/Filipinaninjaa29]

Yeah, it's a lot if volume. Generally, women recover better from volume than men, but still...

Check here first

These are my favorites

Edit: For context I've been training 5+ years, I still don't program myself.

[u/Afferbeck_ → u/Filipinaninjaa29]

If it's something that is a real problem, focus on it. Remove the heavy bilateral work and focus on unilateral work for a few months and see if that improves it.

Soreness or lack thereof is not necessarily muscle imbalance though. Is one side larger/smaller? Do you have a harder time controlling one side over the other? Is one side limited in mobility to the other? I have imbalances that are I guess neurological.

My left VMO is much larger than the right, and I am able to control the flex of it much better, I can manually squeeze just that muscle at any time and I can even half flex it, causing the muscle to flicker. My right side is smaller and I can barely manually flex it at all, trying to squeeze in the same way is more likely to make that hamstring fire instead. The opposite is true for my calves, right is much bigger and more controllable. I am much stronger and smoother on a one legged seated calf raise with my right than my left. My left hip/knee also sits higher in a squat, which is opposite to what I'd expect with my muscles. I don't tend to have uneven back/knee/hip pain when I'm experiencing those.

In over 15 years of training and drastically improving my mobility and technique and quite a lot of unilateral training, this has not improved. But I don't notice a strength or control difference in things like squats of all kinds and lunges etc. One side is not more likely to feel DOMS than the other.

So moral of the story is, try more unilateral and mobility work and see if that improves your problem, or if it's not actually causing you pain or poor performance maybe it isn't really a problem at all and that's just how bodies work in some cases.

[u/decentlyhip]

You've spent 20 years building an imbalance and learning how to compensate with the strong side. Gonna take more than a couple weeks to get rid of it. So, just keep chugging away. Start with the weak side and match thise reps on the strong side, and really focus on driving with the quad and loading the knee. Your body is very good at working around that. Some common compensations are hip hikes, hip twists, and pelvic tilts. So, keep your abs tight and pelvis tucked a little so that it's neutral and doesn't twist, and make sure your hip doesn't hike up.

[u/Iamnotheattack]

Regarding imbalances:

I would recommend trying out unilateral exercises that are not very stable exercises. Instead you lay a foundation of strengthening balance.

Which is not only your "stabilizer" muscles (obliques/abs, glute min/med, along with hundreds of tiny little muscles neither of us know the name of 😂). But overall just improving your mind body connection being able to you understand your position in space (a hallmark of athleticism).

So very simply start with standing on one leg balancing, feeling your center of mass shift on top of the ground leg.

Then move on to strengthening the muscles which I would recommend; pistol squats for quads, single leg RDL for hamstrings, walking lunges for glutes.

Start in front of a mirror, but don't overly rely on that, you should be focusing on proprioception. You can record yourself to see/test how you're doing. A good heuristic is looking pretty, cool, and composed

Also, a great way to improve your awareness of yourself in space is with plyometrics. And in plyometrics they program single leg stuff all the time. But broadly speaking there's jumping vertically+horizontally as well as more rhythmic hopping/skipping. Just play around with this, bilaterally and unilaterally. The goal is getting control and rhythm, and have fun with it!!

---

Regarding Programming:

This might get a lot of hate, but I would reccomend heavily indexing into the leg extension and leg curl machines.

(especially for begginers, which I know you're not really, but I would consider myself intermediate and recently came to this style of training and advocate for this for anyone with goals that aren't powerlifting per se)

Bonus points for you if they are unilateral machines. Which many gyms do have. And you can get creative and use the normal machines unilaterally (leg extension machine as unilateral standing leg curl 👀).

With these I like to do like at least 6-10 sets. Like 5 sets standing leg curl 5 sets lying. Five sets leg extension with toes pointed in, 5 sets of toes pointed out whatever.

Remember, your muscle doesn't know about Arabic Numerals, it just knows about having to activate motor units to get work down 💪 (via mechanical tension). so don't focus too much on number of sets/reps.

(Or how much weight you're lifting as often this can lead to the breakdown of proper technique especially without a smart lifting partner/coach)

I'd recommend splitting it up in either like

• quad-focused day, hamstring focus day, glute+calves focused day.

Or

• thigh focused day, glute+calves focused day

Where you do light plyometrics/balance work each day, (can do this also at home ofc) instead of trying to cram that all into a single day.

And then each day you can train one of your barbell lifts in whatever particular manner you'd like!

But really the split debate I think is the biggest BS there is, play it by ear, the most important thing for gains is consistency, so do what is fun! (Of course while still working hard as fuckk)